Interview Hell

Over at Rate Your Students, a blogger identified as Layla from Lounsberry points out that the best thing about getting a job at MLA is that then you don't have to try to go to MLA to get a job anymore.

That sounds reasonable...at first. But reality proves a bit more complicated:

"It's bad enough to have to seek out the creepy hotel rooms," writes LfL, "where many interviews happen, candidates buzzing upstairs to be admitted like nervous call girls; worse, many interview at the Job Center -- usually a vast ballroom filled wall-to-wall with tables where a lone candidate may face another interrogator or even a whole range of them along with hundreds of other candidates simultaneously. My very first job interview was one of these. My visions of hell, consequently, generally involve the MLA interview pit."

But sooner or later, you find yourself back -- on the other side of the table: "It's horrifying. Worse yet, if you're stupid like me, you got on an executive committee (well, it looked good on the CV when you were job hunting) so you have to go even if you're not interviewing folks for your department. Best of all, if your first job isn't the one you want to keep, you may have to juggle both positions at once, finding some excuse to run off in the midst of interviewing far too many candidates to do your own interview while seeming relaxed and at ease and the perfect colleague."

For the interviewer, the most urgent need is to thin the herd. "Sorry," she writes, " there are so many applications for any job in the humanities, that the first rule of thumb is throw out anyone you can. Rule two is toss anyone who pisses you off for ANY reason. Anything to cut it down to a manageable number for MLA interviews. At my previous job, there wasn't much cutting, so we interviewed such a broad swath of candidates that we couldn't keep them straight. I'm not advocating wearing a neon tie or polka dot stockings, but make sure there's something that fixes you firmly in the memories of the interviewers. Because all the candidates have brilliant dissertations, excellent teaching records and glowing letters of rec. We remembered the guy who picked coconuts for a summer job in college. I wore Doc Martens to my current job's interview. Did it help? Did it hurt? Did anyone even notice? I don't really know."

Memorability is not, as such, a virtue, however: "There was the hopeless candidate locked in the stairwell with no exit because she was nervous about elevators or the one whose bag fell over spilling a veritable pharmacy of drugs across the floor. Watch for that nervous tic: you don't want the interviewers to be thinking, 'If he touches his hair one more time I'm going to scream,' when they should be thinking about how terrific you'll be in the classroom."

To this, the blogger known as Historiann adds: "Don’t ask the chair of the search committee if you can borrow her Chapstik."